While hard drive manufacturers worldwide continue to deal with the aftermath caused by severe flooding in Thailand last fall, Seagate continues to push forward with a new technology "milestone."

Seagate is boasting that it has become the first hard drive producer to achieve a storage density of 1 terabyte per square inch. The significance here is that this paves the way to double the storage capacity of current hard drives over the next decade, especially with 3.5-inch drives with space of 60TB or more.

For reference, the maximum capacity of current 3.5-inch hard drives is 3 terabytes, at about 620 gigabits per square inch. Furthermore, 2.5-inch drives can fit a maximum of 750 gigabytes.

To put this into another mind-boggling perspective, Seagate reps explained in a release that "the bits within a square inch of disk space, at the new milestone, far outnumber stars in the Milky Way, which astronomers put between 200 billion and 400 billion."

Then again, what opportunities could this advancement in local storage present as more consumers and businesses move to the cloud? Considering how much more media content (i.e. books, movies and music) is bought and consumed digitally rather than on paper or discs, there's definitely still a call for more local storage space on computers and tablets.

Mark Re, senior vice president of Heads and Media Research and Development at Seagate, added in the release that "the growth of social media, search engines, cloud computing, rich media and other data-hungry applications continues to stoke demand for ever greater storage capacity."